Crew shows off a hustling team

New eats on Highway 10.

When restaurants start giving free meals in their first days of operation we’ll stop offering assessments based on food and service during those early days.

But having said that, we can’t remember EVER getting better service than we received at the new Crew Restaurant and Bar in the Pleasant Ridge Towne Center on Highway 10.

It was the first week of operation. A Friday night of a Razorback game day at that. Our team-style service by the black-T-shirt-clad crew was so solicitous, so quick, so persistent that we wanted to shout, “Ignore us a minute, will ya? Let me drain that water glass to the bottom just once!”

Crew’s niche? Hard to define. From the outside, where you could see a thicket of beer taps and big TVs tuned to football, we expected maybe a Friday’s, albeit with sleek, modern decor in place of kitsch. It actually is far nicer inside than it appears from outside, though a little bare and hard for our tastes, with the polished concrete flooring, wooden tables and interior adornment mostly in the form of dangling light globes.

The jeans-wearing waitstaff tells you that casual is OK, but it’s still dressy enough for date night. The menu is broad and occasionally intriguing, not just fern bar fare.

A jaded member of our party described it as “Applebee’s plus 10 bucks,” but I found it much more ambitious. (And I’m not knocking Applebee’s, which uniformly delivers reliable, popular food. Right, Ricky Bobby?)

I love a place that offers three daily soups (butternut squash, spicy white bean and black bean chili have been recent choices), but we had other plans. Among starters including sauteed tiger shrimp, crab cake ravioli, portobello fries and baked brie, we chose cigar rolls. Those were crunchy spring rolls ($5.95), stuffed with Szechuan pork and accompanied by a sweet soy dipping sauce. Yum.

We also love interesting, meal-sized salads. Score another point for Crew for beet salad with walnuts and goat cheese, Cobb salad, club salad (with turkey and bacon), Chinese chicken salad and Caesar salad topped with chicken, shrimp or, for us, a huge filet of moist, mild salmon ($7.50 for a bucket portion of greens).

The dinner menu will take multiple trips for adequate exploring — from a Southwestern flavored chicken dish, to braised lamb shank with garlic mashed potatoes, to Cajun-style shrimp, chicken and corn maque choux, to a giant blackened pork chop, to duck breast and steak, stir fry, pasta and fish.

Overwhelmed by the variety, we defaulted to the menu’s top-dollar item, a $23.95 ribeye. It’s big, flavorful and was cooked rare, as ordered. It comes with a cup of what’s said to be house-made steak sauce, a savory dip similar to many bottled varieties but good just the same. The steak also came with rosemary-flecked shoestring french fries — if not the best in the city as good as we can recall in a long while. Other vegetable sides were included — a choice of French green beans, sauteed vegetables and, hold your hat, pureed beets. Entrees, not counting sandwiches, start at $12.95 for blackened catfish.

Another thing we like: the 10 beer, ale and cider choices on tap (a pint of Stella Artois for us, thanks), plus 40 or so more in the bottle, and the two groups of identically priced wines by the bottle and glass. Full bar, too. And 40-year-old port, if you must know.

Quibbles: We might turn down the music a little — some pop and rock identifiable to the younger people in our group but not the fogeys. There’s nothing to be done about the horrendously designed traffic approaches to this shopping center except to pray. Still, it’s worth taking your best shot to drop by Crew, a promising new stop that reflects the strong professional resume of owner/chef Scott Holtzhouser. He has a similar Crew restaurant in New York, among other restaurant ventures.